With the end of 2021 approaching, the EU Innovative Partnership for Action Against Cancer is also coming to an end. Its main output is an online database of projects, activities and recommendations in various areas of cancer prevention and care, to the development of which the joint workplace of the Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses at the Faculty of Medicine of the Masaryk University (IBA FM MU) and the Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic (IHIS CR) has significantly contributed.
The Innovative Partnership for Action Against Cancer Joint Action (iPAAC JA) brought together 44 partners from 24 European countries to contribute to the development of innovative approaches in the fight against cancer. The main output is the Roadmap on Implementation and Sustainability of Cancer Control Actions – an online tool that can be described in a simplified way as an overview of possible approaches, activities and recommendations on different aspects of cancer care that either have already been implemented in some European countries, or will be implemented soon. In one place, it is possible to find out how different countries approach primary or secondary prevention, how they organise treatment for cancer patients, or how they provide care for cancer survivors.
The Roadmap is a web-based application that allows users to browse and search for individual projects according to the domain of the cancer programmes they address or the country they come from. The development of the web application, which is available at www.ipaac.eu/roadmap, was carried out by IBA FM MU and IHIS CR in close cooperation with the Belgian health institute Sciensano, whose team was responsible for identifying suitable projects and collecting information about them. Each of these projects is described in a unified and structured way by means of a one-pager; it is really a one-page information containing relevant background information, identifying potential problems and presenting the most important results and experience, but also providing links to detailed materials and contact details of the responsible institutions.
“The Roadmap is a truly unique tool that allows policy makers dealing with cancer programme to draw inspiration from the experience of other countries. The breadth of the presented projects, as well as the practical experience from the implementation of these projects, can significantly help in the implementation in other countries and help cancer patients or strengthen cancer prevention,” says Ondřej Májek from the IBA FM MU, one of the representatives of the Czech Republic in the iPAAC project.
“Our web design team participated in the successful solution of another international project that brought together experts from the fields of oncology, public health, and information and communication technologies. In particular, further deepening of cooperation with leading experts across major European institutions and additional experience in the design, development and implementation of an internationally recognisable output is certainly a benefit for the Faculty of Medicine,” added Martin Komenda, expert guarantor of IT development.
Apart from technical development, the FM MU team also participated in other activities within the iPAAC JA. These included the management of a work package focused on communication (including the website), and a significant contribution in areas where the Czech Republic already has a strong position, i.e. screening programmes and cancer registries.
For the first time in history, the 16th MEFANET conference was held outside the Czech Republic in the Slovak Congress Hotel Centrum in Košice. The whole event was held in the spirit of artificial intelligence in medical education, virtual reality and there were also short presentations by regular participants about their improvement and modernization of teaching.
Over the past three years, not only has a wave of severe respiratory disease swept over virtually all of human civilization, but also a wave of vast amounts of information related to it. A new book by Václav Moravec and Ladislav Dušek deals with this phenomenon that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic and often caused more damage than the virus alone.
